“So I guess I’ll get sued, too.”
“Probably,” I muttered as I stood at my desk, shuffling through yesterday’s telephone messages. “Why does everybody call when I’m not here?”
“I’m kinda getting into being sued,” Marino said. “Makes me feel special.”
“I just can’t get used to you in uniform, Captain Marino,” Rose said. “Should I salute?”
“Don’t turn me on, Rose:’
“I thought your shift didn’t start until three,” I said.
“Nice thing about me being sued is the city’s gotta pay. Ha. Ha. Screw ’em.”
“We’ll see how Ha Ha it is when you end up paying one of these days and lose your truck and aboveground swimming pool. Or all those Christmas decorations and extra fuse boxes, God forbid,” Rose told him as I opened and shut my desk drawers.
“Has anybody seen my pens?” I asked. “I don’t have a single goddamn pen. Rose? Those Pilot rolling ball pens. I had at least a box of them on Friday. I know I did because I bought them myself last time I was at Ukrops. And I don’t believe it. My Waterman’s missing, too!”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you about leaving anything valuable around here,” Rose told me.
“I gotta smoke,” Marino said to me. “I’ve had it with these damn smoke-free buildings. All these dead people in your joint and the state’s worried about smoking. What about all those formalin fumes? A few good whiffs of that will drop a horse.”
“Damn!” I shoved one drawer shut and yanked open another. “And guess what else? No Advil, no BC powders -and no Sudafed. Now I’m really getting angry.”
“Coffee money, Cleta’s portable phone, lunches, and now your pens and aspirin. I’ve gotten to where I take my pocketbook everywhere I go. The office’s started calling whoever it is `The Body Snatcher,’ ” Rose angrily said. “Which I don’t think is funny in the least.”
Marino walked over and put his arm around her.
“Sweetheart, you can’t blame a guy for wanting to snatch your body,” he sweetly said in her ear. “I’ve been wanting to ever since I first laid eyes on you way back when I had to teach the doc everything she knows.”
Rose demurely pecked his cheek and leaned her head against his shoulder. She looked defeated and suddenly very old.
“I’m tired, Captain,” Rose muttered.
“Me too, sweetheart. Me, too.”
I looked at my watch.
“Rose, please tell everyone staff conference’s going to be a few minutes late. Marino, let’s talk.”
The smoking room was a corner in the bay where there were two chairs, a Coke machine and a dirty, dented ashcan that Marino and I put between us. Both of us lit up, and I felt the same old bite of shame.
“Why are you here?” I asked. “Didn’t you cause enough problems for yourself yesterday?”
“I was thinking about what Lucy said last night,” Marino said. “About my current situation, you know. How it’s like I’m hitting the bricks, out of service, finished, Doc. I can’t take it, if you want to know the truth. I’m a detective. I’ve been one almost all my life. I can’t do this uniform shit. I can’t work for assholes like Diane ‘Donkey’ Bray.”
“That’s why you took the field investigation exam last year,” I reminded him. “You don’t have to stay with the police department, Marino. Not with any police department. You’ve got more than enough years in to retire. You can make your own rules.”
“No offense, Doc, but I don’t want to work for you, either,” he said. “Not part-time or on a case basis or whatever.”
The state had given me two slots for field investigators, and I had not filled either one of them yet.
“The point is, you have options,” I replied, touched by hurt I would not show.
He was silent. Benton walked into my mind and I saw his feelings in his eyes, and then he was gone. I felt the cooling shadow of Rose and feared the loss of Lucy. I thought of getting old and people vanishing from my life.
“Don’t quit on me, Marino,” I told him.
He didn’t answer me right away, and when he did, his eyes blazed.